Strange Passings in Brooklyn: A Field Report from 'Making It'

In 2008, L.A. rock veterans (and real-life couple) Stew and Heidi Rodewald took a break from the Los Feliz music scene to come east—way east— to Broadway. Their show was called Passing Strange and it was a semi-autobiographical look at Stew’s Los Angeles childhood and his twenties in Berlin. The critics wet themselves. Passing Strange was nominated for seven Tony Awards. Adam Duritz called Stew "the best songwriter there is working now." Spike Lee filmed the final three performances for posterity, and premiered the movie at Sundance in 2009.

But then Passing Strange closed. Stew and Heidi broke up. And for a while there, it seemed like the one-time pair (who’d previously performed under the moniker the Negro Problem) were done making music together. At least music about their relationship.

Yet! Thanks to the intervention of friends, Stew and Heidi are writing again, opening up barely-scabbed wounds. And at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last night, they debuted an hour-long piece called Making It, which deftly chronicles the implosion of a personal relationship amidst sudden public success.

Happy times! So why was Stew so surly last night?

The problem at St. Ann’s certainly wasn’t the music. The music in Making It is gorgeous, lived-in rock and soul, offering an intimate look at a love affair going off the rails. Sample lyric: "Therapy only works when you tell the truth." And that’s just an appetizer. In a song called "Leave/Believe," these two former lovers, Heidi and Stew, sit before you on a stage made to look like someone’s living room, singing to each other: "It took a little while for me to see, that you’d stopped believing in me. I wasn’t left with much to do. So I stopped believing in you." That’s a punch to the gut, followed by a swift kick to the face.

But what seemed to get stuck in Stew’s craw was a disconnect between crowd and performer. The audience, apparently more Great White Way than Echo Park, came to Brooklyn to see a work-in-progress sequel to Broadway’s Passing Strange. Stew—dressed in an orange prison-issue jumpsuit, because why not—came to rock. An hour into the show, he and his band walked off the stage without a word. Was this intermission? Nah. Stew wanted the crowd to beg for more.

After a few awkward minutes of whispering in the audience, Stew emerged with a beer in hand to some polite applause.

"Don’t fake it," he said to the crowd. "I can tell when you’re faking it. This is some motherfuckin’ bullshit." (Editor’s note: This almost never happens at Jersey Boys.)

Stew did eventually play a few more songs, even taking requests from the audience. But he left the older-skewing crowd with a message. "Call your friends. Tell them: ’This is not one of those things where we come to the front of the stage at the end and bow.’ We did one of those. It was a detour."